Deliberate Mistakes

Mistakes exist in context. In a particular card game, revealing your cards to the other player is a mistake. Outside the game, you can show any card you like and it does not matter.

Making mistakes while teaching is similar: a “mistake” depends on the moment, on the student, on the context. On the teacher’s conception.

We instinctively hide our mistakes, but the more we work to avoid and conceal them, the narrower the range of our movement, our conception, our teaching. This is as true for teachers as students, but teachers in addition have been told they should not make mistakes — or at least fewer. We are more experienced, yes? We know the rules better, yes?

These rules, whatever they are, are summaries of decisions we have made, of experience codified. We must have such guidelines, of course, or each moment requires onerous new analysis. But it is easy to go too far, to conclude there is one way for things to be, one way to teach, and to take that one way again and again. To become inured to the new. To become bored.

Deliberate engagement in mistakes is the practice of making new paths, widening your range. Liberating your conception.

I had thought here to offer warning against seeking mistakes that might damage the student. That is an important subject, but a damaged student is an outcome, not a process. So I will say this: I am not suggesting we seek to break or harm students with our mistakes, but rather to use this practice to challenge our egos, to challenge our limits.

There is a myth, a script, that says the teacher does not, should not, make mistakes. It goes on to say that teacher mistakes should only seem to be mistakes to the student who does not yet understand the teacher’s true intent. Indeed, a clever teacher can arrange for the student to conclude this about nearly any misstep, a fascinating subject I hope to explore some other time. Choosing to reveal your mistakes to the student changes this script.

If you are a teacher of spiritual matters and you allow yourself to make and show mistakes while teaching, what then? What happens when you push your teaching to this edge?

This practice can help us loosen the grip of the script that says we must dispense correct knowledge, correct wisdom. It can change our relationship to the student, what we see, how we teach. For many teachers this is an enormous and courageous step.

What sort of mistakes might we seek for this practice? There are simple mistakes, certainly, like mathematical errors or putting together words in defiance of the rules of grammar. Try these if you wish, but they are the easy ones; the mistakes that we avoid most fervently are the ones we fear say something about us, perhaps that we are not competent to teach, not spirituality, not our subject matter. This is the fear that narrows a teacher’s vision to the safest correct actions, again and again.

Practicing mistakes can begin to open our view, liberate us. We can allow ourselves to be ill-prepared, to be uncertain about how to teach, to give ourselves pause in the middle of speaking. We can ask the students what they want to learn, throw away the plan, let ourselves stumble. Seek our own awkwardness.

Then see what happens. It is not enough to stumble — we must notice and learn. In that awkward moment, listen. Listen to your own thoughts. Listen to the student.

To seek even more liberation from fear of judgment, show your mistakes more openly. Invite your students to evaluate you, to point out your weaknesses. Seek your own fears, use them to gain understanding. This is terrifying. This is depth.

But what about authority? If we show our mistakes, will we seem weak? Will we damage our authority?

Is the card in the game or out? You decide the context.